Time Warner Bringing Digital Magazines, HBO to More Platforms

Giant companies are funny things. It doesn’t matter whether they’re in tech, media or any other field. Sometimes all their component parts are working on different projects, trying hundreds of different experiments, moving in dozens of different directions — and sometimes, whole chunks move as one. THIS is what we’re doing now. It’s almost audible: WHOOOOSH.

Time’s also pursuing the same subscription and purchase strategy across all platforms: print subscribers get digital access for free, while readers can also buy a digital subscription or single issues through the various platforms’ app marketplaces. They also plan to incorporate the magazine’s existing print ads into the digital editions. It’s a unified, cross-platform approach to digital magazines.

Time Warner’s other major media component is video, specifically movie studios and television networks. On Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call, CEO Jeff Bewkes announced that the company was expanding its TV Everywhere strategy, bringing the popular HBO Go service to game consoles, smart televisions and other streaming media boxes. (See Ryan Lawler’s report on the earnings call at GigaOM.)

HBO Go currently offers cable HBO subscribers digital access to every episode of every original series and a range of other TV and movie content. They can access that content using a desktop web browser or using a mobile or tablet app. According to Bewkes, those iOS and Android apps have been downloaded over 4 million times, ramping up subscribers’ total viewing of and engagement with the network’s content.

Bringing HBO Go to connected TVs and consoles is smart in several ways:

It increases the value of the service for HBO’s subscribers. Existing cable subscribers have more reasons to add HBO as a premium channel, and current subscribers have fewer reasons to cut the cord.

HBO just decreased the gap between itself and Netflix, which is increasingly a competitor for dollars and attention. Bewkes has been frank about his dislike for Netflix’s effect on the TV and movie industry, and Netflix has been equally frank about their desire to add HBO’s content. If HBO can get everywhere Netflix can, HBO has no reason to use Netflix for digital distribution.

Alas, there’s still no way for customers to buy a subscription to HBO Go alone — which would be a boon to viewers who want HBO’s new content and back catalog but don’t want a monthly cable bill.

HBO is now in a better bargaining position with cable and satellite companies for access to its on-demand content. HBO can offer these companies less and charge more, while still getting its content to its most die-hard subscribers. And if HBO walks away from the table, it’s increasingly likely these subscribers would walk with them.

That’s the big move. If you subscribe to Time Warner’s media content, Time Warner will find a way to get that content to you on the machine or machines of your choice. And if you don’t subscribe because you currently consume most of your media content on a digital device, then Time Warner wants to convince you to give them a try.

HBO Go seems like less of a gamble; Time, Inc’s, more so. Not all print content succeeds equally well on every tablet. Advertisers like big pages and big screens.

Likewise, some users of tablet magazines expect web-like interactivity; others simply prefer to read. To encode every magazine for every platform costs money — or turns a dynamic magazine into a glorified PDF.

But it’s a big move. We’ll just have to wait and see whether all of Time Warner’s brands can do as well on all platforms as their flagships have done on Apple’s iThings.